Cook To The Beat — Food-based Rhythm

Another food game, this one with some music to make it stand out. Cook To The Beat is a simplistic mobile cooking game where you are basically just chopping up a bunch of ingredients that sort of make sense to a recipe, trying to get the biggest combos possible.

Music plays in the background, you’re a giant sloth, all you need to do is chop the ingredients from a conveyor belt correctly in Cook To The Beat. These ingredients have various points on them where you’ll see different colored shapes and symbols. The most common is a simple tap, which chops the ingredient at that point. You’ll also find orange diamonds, which require you to tap on both sides of the scree, and blue or pink diamonds which require you to tap either the left or right side, depending on the color. There are also long purple shapes, where you need to tenderise the ingredient by tapping as much as you can anywhere.

Each recipe listed as a level select on the main menu has it’s own music and a few different modes. Mild is the default, then medium and spicy are there for the challenge. You need to pay energy to play each level, with more challenging levels costing more energy. In Cook To The Beat, as an adult, energy is easy to come by. Perfecting levels (which is quite easy to do on Mild) will provide far more energy than you have spent. When it comes to medium and spicy, however, the gameplay really steps up.

At the end of the level there are a few different bonuses that you can earn, depending on how well you did, how much you got excellent taps, etc, you will gain coins, picnic baskets that can be opened for clothing or energy, as well as just straight up energy. You will also gain XP, which can level you up and unlock more recipes for you to try out.

Clothing works as different multipliers, that you can activate if they charge up during your chopping level, tapping them to give you more of an advantage. They also make your chef look very, very cute. In game currency can be spent on different energy packs or these mystery picnic baskets and real money can be spent on in-game currency, though I haven’t felt the need to purchase anything myself. There are no ads within the game either, so as long as you are skilled, you shouldn’t need to spend money and won’t see ads.

As you get further in Cook To The Beat, you will unlock new chefs that have special recipes that they enjoy. This is a cute feature, especially as you can dress them up as well. The game itself feels fun and the easier levels are perfect for children to try out. The more challenging levels are great for adults who like cute rhythm games or teenagers who can handle the challenge. At times, you will need to reply recipes or try them at a higher challenge level to gain enough XP to move on.

I do wish that this cooking game was more than chopping, seasoning and tenderising, as a lot of the time the amount of ingredients don’t make sense in the recipe and you do not get to see what you made at the end. I just feel it could be expanded upon to make more sense, when it comes to the word cooking. Nevertheless, Cook To The Beat is a fun little game, especially if you like food-based rhythm as a concept! You can spend quite some time unlocking recipes and trying out difficulties yourself.

Jupiter Hadley is a indie game enthusiast who specializes in Game Jams. She records thousands of games a year on her YouTube channel and writes for various websites online. If you wish to contact Jupiter, you can find her on twitter @Jupiter_Hadley or support her on Patreon. You can find all of her work at www.Jupiterhadley.com